The Emerging Sex Panic
Targeting Gay Men

By Eric RofesSpeech given at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force's
Creating Change Conference in San Diego, November 16, 1997

Historian Allan Berube has defined a "sex
panic"
as a "moral crusade that leads to crackdowns on sexual
outsiders."
It is distinct from ongoing harassment and vilification
of the sexual fringe.
It requires the following components: ideology, the
machinery and the power
to transform ideology into action, and
scapegoated populations, sites, and
sexual practices.

During a
sex panic, a wide array of free-floating cultural fears are
mapped onto
specific populations who are then ostracized, victimized, and
punished.
As Gayle Rubin has observed, historically we have seen that when
moral
panics are over, countless individuals and groups have suffered greatly
and the original triggering social problems have not been remedied.

Gay men have no corner on the market on sex panics. In recent years,
we have seen sexual terrors marshaled to create a stampede mentality to
trample upon many groups including prostitutes and other sex workers,
African-American
men, welfare mothers, sex offenders as a class, and men
who engage in consensual
sex with male teenagers.

Are We Confronting a Sex Panic
Today?

Currently debate rages among sectors of gay male
communities about whether
contemporary spates of police entrapments,
closures of commercial sex establishments,
encroachments on public sex
areas, and vilification of specific gay male
subcultures constitute a sex
panic. It is important to distinguish between
ongoing waves of harassment
and victimization and a full-scale sex panic
because, while both are
destructive of lives and communities, a sex panic
alone is characterized
by a sustained period of intensified persecution
of sexual minorities
involving punitive state action, public disgrace, and
a powerful cultural
dynamic of scapegoating, shaming, and silencing of alternative
viewpoints. While communists were harassed and persecuted in this nation
during the 1940s, it took the coalescing of a variety of cultural factors
in the late 1940s and early 1950s to create the moral panic we have come
to know as "The McCarthy Period."

I believe we may be
witnessing the early stages of an emerging sex panic
focused on
sexually-active gay men who do not organize their sex and relationships
following heteronormative models. It is at different stages in different
locations. For example, I believe this sex panic has emerged in New York
City with a sustained, intensified period of policing, harassment, and
closure
of many gay sex spaces and an accompanying discourse in the media
about
the need to halt continuing gay male HIV infections. In places like
Los
Angeles, Miami, Washington, D.C., Austin, and Providence, it is
clearly
at an earlier stage. Sex panic looks different in urban, small
city, and
rural areas and will have different characteristics, contexts,
and trajectories.

What we are witnessing in 1997 are several
powerful social shifts which
could easily and swiftly fall into place,
causing a full-scale sex panic
to break out nationwide at any time. This
is the way terror and scapegoating
operate in a postmodern culture. At
least four factors are contributing
to a mounting sex panic:

The ascendancy and entrenchment of the Far Right and their
development,
testing, and successful utilization of sex as a wedge
issue which speedily
divides liberals and Leftists, their primary
opponents.

The redistribution and intense concentration of wealth
creating vast
economic disparities and making the urban centers of our
nation sites of
contentious class-based battles over massive corporate
land-grabs.

A shift in public awareness from the belief that gay
men had stopped
transmitting HIV to the realization that gay men
continue to become infected
with HIV at significant levels. This is
accompanied by many gay men and
lesbians' feelings of embarassment,
shame, and outrage.

The relative success of gay rights efforts
where certain victories
are offered predicated on the sacrifice of
certain sectors of our communities
or the squelching of certain social,
cultural, or sexual processes which
seem different from heterosexual
social norms.

Why Are the
Current Debates Flaring
Into Sexual Civil Wars?

The
emerging sex panic appears to be shaping up as characterized by an
ideology which believes gay men's sex is not only sinful and predatory,
but is responsible for an escalating AIDS epidemic. We are seeing the
machinery
and the power to transform ideology into action emerging in
media frenzies
over gay men's sex, the conceptualization of current
health problems as
public health emergencies, the use of exceptional
measures to restrict sex
spaces by public officials, and extreme actions
by police officers and other
representatives of state power to curtail
the sexual activity and drug use
of gay men. Media accounts are
increasingly scapegoating specific populations--at
this moment, circuit
boys are the scapegoat-of-choice,--sites such as bathhouses,
sex clubs,
and circuit parties, and activities such as "barebacking."
It
is also characterized by the active involvement and, in some cases,
instigation
and leadership of gay and lesbian journalists, political
leaders, public
officials, HIV prevention workers, and other public
health officials.

This is precisely what makes the current
debates problematic and why
many have such powerful feelings of rage and
betrayal:

20 years ago we heard Anita Bryant and Paul
Cameron insisting gay male
sex is diseased and suicidal and these days
we hear gay men saying the
exact same thing.

20 years ago we
fought heterosexuals in the mainstream media who invaded
our sex spaces
and wrote lurid, uninformed accounts of our sex cultures.
These days
it's gay men working in the mainstream media who invade the
spaces and
write the same lurid stories.

20 years ago it was heterosexual
public officials who ordered crackdowns
on gay bars, mass entrapment at
rest stops, and the intense regulation,
policing, and closure of sex
clubs. These days it could be queer public
officials ordering such
actions.

Those of us defending gay male sex cultures are not
indifferent to HIV
prevention efforts. Many of us are leaders in both
areas. We know that effective
prevention is build on sexual empowerment
and believe that decades of public
health research show that tactics of
guilt, fear, and repression exacerbate
public health crises rather than
deter them. It is precisely because many
people have become frustrated
with HIV prevention and feel at a loss to
chart new directions for our
work, that the time is ripe for an escalation
of support for coercive
measures to stop gay men's sex.

Those of us standing up for
sexual freedom are neither lost in a romanticized
version of the golden
age of the 1970s nor dick-hungry men who are selfishly
seeking more power
and more privilege. We have been condescendingly characterized
as
immature children who haven't grown up and need to get with the times,
put our pricks back in our pants, and apply our energies to the real
challenges
facing our communities, like gays-in-the-military or gay
marriage. Yet we
believe that even a cursory look at the histories of our
movement will show
that sexual liberation has been inextricably bound
together with gay liberation,
the women's movement, and the emancipation
of youth. Among the most effective
ways of oppressing a people is through
the colonization of their bodies,
the stigmatizing of their desires, and
the repression of their erotic energies.
We believe continuing work on
sexual liberation is crucial to social justice
efforts.

Those of
us taking action to monitor, de-track, and resist the emerging
sex panic
find ourselves increasingly at odds with mainstream gay efforts
to
present a sanitized vision of our people which has replaced butch/femme
dykes with Heather and her two mommies and kinky gay men with domestic
partner
wedding cakes. Can we not advocate for a pluralistic queer
culture where
we affirm everyone's right to self-determination in the
ways they organize
their sexual relations and construct their kinship
patterns?

How Can We
Prevent a Full Scale
Moral Panic Over Gay Men's Sex?

People who want to stave off the emerging moral panic should go home
and organize local activist groups like queers of all genders have done
in New York and San Francisco. I hope you write letters and hold the
media
and public officials accountable for their actions and refuse to
renounce
our movement's historic linkage with sexual liberation. And I
encourage
you to continue our efforts at HIV prevention but refuse to
support a panic-based
response to continuing gay male seroconversions or
feel that current infections
diminish our communities' contributions to
the fight against AIDS of the
past 15 years.

For those of you who
are ambivalent about such organizing, and for mainstream
gay groups who
are scared to touch these issues with a ten foot pole, let
me say one
thing: When full moral panics flare history has shown, in Lillian
Hellman's words, it's "scoundrel time" and there are limited
roles
from which social actors can choose. There are the scoundrels who
blow the
whistle, point the finger, name the names. There are the
resistors who take
the risk, go out on the limb, take the fall, and get
trampled in the mindless,
outraged stampede. And there are the vast
masses who find themselves locked
in silence by confusion, misgivings,
self-protection, ambivalence, and fear.
When the panic is over and
attention has shifted to other issues, when we
all shake our heads and
say "How did we ever let it get to that stage?,"
these people
are complicit in the destruction. There is no neutral here.

Please consider three final points.

Regardless of your confusion or misgivings stand up firmly against
any efforts which mobilize arms of the state to restrict the right of
sexual
and reproductive self-determination. You don't like sex clubs,
don't go
to sex clubs. But do not ask your local authorities to shut
them down.
You don't like sex areas in parks, don't go to sex areas in
parks, but
don't invite police to bust the men who enjoy such
activities.

Refuse to cast off any section of our community in
order to gain privileges
and social acceptance. Demand a continuing
commitment to a pluralistic
vision of community. Resist scapegoating
subcultures you don't know and
you don't understand.

Try to
understand the historic role sex cultures have played in the
formation
of queer identities and communities and resist seeing them simply
as an
unfortunate by-product of antigay oppression. Are our sex cultures
evidence of our stigmatization, abuse, and reprobation? Or, to borrow
James
Baldwin's language about a parallel matter, can they be
understood as "cultural
patterns coming into existence by means of
brutal necessity" and can
they be seen as strategies for survival?

Perhaps the real trouble with gay men's sex cultures, in a time
when
many in our communities are replicating heterosexual patterns of
social
organization, is that they alone give testimony to the fact that
gay men
as a class have not completely assimilated.

Eric Rofes is a long-time community organizer based in
San
Francisco and was an organizer of the Sex Panic Summit which occurred
in
San Diego on November 13, 1997. He is the author of Reviving the Tribe:
Regenerating Gay Men's Sexuality and Culture in the Ongoing Epidemic.